Item — HN Reader

Some of the most reliable software I use is written in C. Software I use for decades and which never crashed for me. I can't say this about much other software.

Clearly, you can write shitty software and this is also far too easy in C, but there are also many tools and techniques one can use to write reliable software in C. Rust is also a tool that can be used to write more reliable software, but it is not clear to me why this should suddenly make the big difference. People who want to write bad software can also sprinkle "unsafe" everywhere, and I would guess that this one happens a lot more once Rust is adopted more. And in the CrowdStrike case, Rust's default behavior to panic might not have necessarily prevented the problem.

Having said this, regarding security against malicious hacking, memory safety is indeed one important component and Rust clearly has an edge there. In terms of general software bugs, it switching to other languages than C/C++ is certainly not a magic bullet and I often doubt that it would even an improvement in most scenarios.

1 comments

> Some of the most reliable software I use is written in C. Software I use for decades and which never crashed for me. I can't say this about much other software.

After several years of efforts. I have written several apps in JavaScript, Rust, C++, Python. Of these, only Rust is the one that I can safely NEVER look back and be satisfied. Everything else just left me wondering if I have missed an enum or something stupid like that.

> People who want to write bad software can also sprinkle "unsafe" everywhere, and I would guess that this one happens a lot more once Rust is adopted more.

People actually _dont_ like to use unsafe (some people do, surprise, surprise, they are usually C folks). Most people that I see usually wants to get as quickly as possible out of unsafe. Why not? Believe it or not, people actually don't want to deal with tagged enums, or parse JSON themselves, or care about how do i properly set up SIMDs. They just use correct APIs so they can sleep at night instead of staring at stack traces.

Rust is not perfect, true, but it is way, way better than C. How many software have been written in other language, and then the authors decided to write it back in C? If this does happen, it is usually something that is very well defined already. I haven't heard anything significant recently. I think there's a place in C as it provides a very stable and reliable API.

> switching to other languages than C/C++ is certainly not a magic bullet

its definitely a magic bullet that kills a LOT of problems tho? No one is saying it fixes everything. If we keep using C or C++ for the next 1000 years, we will have the same sets of problems. Things will NEVER improve.

This is a lot "in my opinion better or worse". I disagree.

And yes, it happens that stuff is written in C. But it is not discussed every time on HN such as the many "XY written in Rust" articles, because the the later apparently is still newsworthy.